Scammers gonna scam. Suckers gonna lose (including the suckers who fancy themselves as scammers but don’t realise it’s a rigged game).
The notion that laws are preventing a golden age of crypto prosperity doesn’t make any sense. There are numerous countries where these coins can operate and they still don’t deliver any of these claims.
> It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
What a weird claim. I assume you’re talking about CAFE regulations, but with an extremist conservative talking point twist.
This is a favorite talking point, but people conveniently ignore the fact that we have small and fuel efficient pickup trucks that people don’t buy. Honda made a FWD unibody pickup that fit many needs, but people just don’t want it.
Not to mention the fact that the CAFE regulations were 2025 targets, or that we have had multiple presidents since then and different political parties have had their chance to change things.
Yet blaming Obama is fun, so let’s go with that.
Before you knock it, look at the following:
https://intercoin.app/investors.pdf
https://intercoin.app/currencies.pdf
Or if you want to see actual open source solutions, coded, see here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
I know some people will knee-jerk downvote this. But actually look into the substance, first.
TLDR: I have been speaking against “HODL” and zero-sum games just for “number go up” nonsense, and been building solutions for maximum utility.
I'm not ... completely unable to be persuaded that there are use cases for cryptocurrency. But "Ashton Kutcher should have Aston Kutchercoin, and develop some sort of referral-based pyramid-shaped scheme with it for his fans" is... what is that?
1) A way to fill unsold seats at venues, and always have sold-out events
2) A way to reward his members for spreading his message and bringing more people
3) A way to turn his audience into an army of promoters
4) A way to be independent of banks, and accept global payments
5) A way to have a global online movement that becomes bigger than Ashton Kutcher himself... having subcommunities be empowered to get together and form their own meetups, see it happen around the world, if they get large then Ashton and his crew can come and do a rock concert there
It's great for political campaigns and many movements as well. We did it for Yang's 2020 campaign for example, with "Yang Gangs", that was very early days in 2020
1. How?
2. Reward them with what?
3. Fans are already promoters.
4. Why is this a good thing?
5. This is just describing fandom, which already exists?
To the hopeful new rent seeker, the pitch is obvious. To everyone else, the provided rationales tend to sound like a whole lot of bullshit.
This is like asking why people should switch from telephone switchboard operators, to automatic switchboards. Or why should anyone switch from livery cab services to Uber.
Technology may be "less proven" initially, but it's far more reliable in the end. It also removes a whole class of inefficiencies and conflicts that won't be possible with smart contracts, the same way that you could remove them if you switched from anything custom to anything standardized.
If you just stopped repeating the same tropes "web3 bad" for the sake of saying them, and engage with the substance, you'll see that this is a case of standardization, automation and programming what was previously ad-hoc and requires costly arbitration after the fact.
It's like saying doctors and medicine are desirable once a medical condition arises. But sometimes, preventative medicine and eating right in the first place is better.
An once of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix. It's better to just have existing systems. Like for example having red lights at intersections, where everyone knows when it's their turn to move.
You understand that software can automate things. That's good. Now you have to understand that web3 is nothing but software which is decentralized and byzantine fault tolerant, so you can trust that the code is being executed correctly. This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database, and then we can catch them and try to recover from this corruption using litigation. That's what MtGox was.
> Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix.
Such as?
> This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
Massive theoretical improvement. No debate there. The question is about applicability, which I notice you've still not made concrete.
> It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database
I don't know, it basically seems to work and as far as I can tell, you're about a billion times more likely to have your shit stolen from you in the web3/cryptoverse than using the traditional financial system... except of course if you're a criminal and/or a more grey-area "unsavory character" to some of the main stakeholders. Which that is a good usecase for this tech, of course.
1) People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption (this is the big one)
2) Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should (this is the reason that databases use stored procedures, for example)
I can list a few, but there are literally thousands:
1) In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked. You can have N winners, and once the N+1st arrives, it returns the money to the lowest bidder who can bid again. Bids increase at a predictable rate, everyone knows the deal upfront, etc.
As opposed to, say, this on the highest level: https://observer.com/2018/03/christies-sothebys-lawsuits-sho...
2) Salaries can be paid out to specific addresses, at a specific rate, and be approved by managers, with the history of all this preserved
3) Atomic swaps between tokens, escrow, each side knows the money is there and will be released if they do their part
4) Rules about staking reserves, guarantee the money is there for vendors to cash out, vendors must be whitelisted to cash out, etc. etc.
5) Large Communities can enforce their "constitution" and which roles invite which roles, at what rate, etc. Ah here, just look:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-defi-communityco...
and so on and so forth
I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.
> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should
Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.
> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked
And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.
> 2-5
We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.
You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.
"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.
2. With your own coin, obviously. If the coin has value aboard a cruise ship, or events, etc. then everyone wins. There are many businesses that can benefit from selling unused inventory, and they may as well sell it for coins earned for things like bring other paying customers, contributing great testimonials, content, etc. Imagine being able to go on stage if you earned enough "loyalty points" or whatever.
3. Loyalty points have been around forever. And no, fans are not already promoters. I know in my own personal experience that even INVESTORS who invested in your company often sit back and hope that you'll make them a profit somehow, instead of bringing others in behind them. Let alone people who just come to a show. The easier you make it for them, e.g. having your own site with custom links that they can share and earn "affiliate revenue" in your own coin, the more traffic you'll get.
4. You get more traffic. More audience. More capital. More money. More loyalty. Independence from having your speech restricted or demonetized. Look at all the youtube personalities openly saying that they can't say this or that. Many comedians and performers are sensitive to being censored.
5) Also you can easily collect money from a global audience, and pay out to a global audience, without being a central bottleneck (FinTech) and without being required to post surety bonds as a "money-transmitter", instead letting people transact directly and you don't have the liability, and they don't have to trust you like they trust Binance or FTX or Celsius with custody of their funds etc. etc. You just provide the Web interface, they do the transaction, facilitated by IMMUTABLE smart contracts.
It's much better when you can issue your own money supply
The celebrity gets to have their own web server, their own coin, etc. making them independent of Big Tech and Big Banks. They can't get deplatformed. Their community can organize however they deem fit. The smart contracts allow everyone to trust the system.
Just saying someone will "pay you" like they did for millennia doesn't really discuss "in what medium". We have long moved past commodity money, gold blocks, then gold coins, then paper banknotes, to electronic money inside regulated banks, this is just the latest form that money can take.
Opposing it for the sake of opposing it, is like opposing the Web and HTTP and open protocols, because you think AOL and MSN walled gardens ought to be good enough for anybody, and no one really needs any custom servers or self-sovereign websites.
The kinds of people who are concerned are almost always people who engaging in risky or criminal behavior.
In the existing system, people can claw back money if they're defrauded or money is stolen. Under the memecoin system, that's impossible.
In the regular system risk is passed upward to regular bank you deal with, then upward to the government bank. The frustrating part here is that the regular bank makes all, or very nearly all, the profit, yet passes on the risk. This gives them enormous amounts of power, through wealth, which is far from ideal. But, much, much worse is the concept of removing the regular bank, and government bank, replacing them with a random person online. And passing the risk downward to the users of the currency.
"The American Conservative further stated that a contingent of Yang's digital followers were only backing him for "a fresh platform for surreal and cynical humor" and that Yang had to denounce part of and distance himself from the movement, which largely stemmed from digital supporters of the Trump 2016 campaign.[85]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang_2020_presidential_...
And you don't need multiple levels. You can have one level. That's called affiliate marketing.
Loyalty points are a thing. You can earn them as an affiliate, for instance. It doesn't have to be a pyramid. But if you are going that route, almost all startups are "pyramid schemes" that end up with an IPO where the public continues to demand rents be extracted perpetually to boost stock price endlesssly, resulting in increased "enshittification". I'd rather people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction and enshittification for everyone else.
In this case, this wouldn't even fit the mold for a multilevel marketing scheme, or even affiliate marketing. There are real cash flows detached from a buy-in both of those schemes.
>people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction
Again, there's cash flows underlying shares of a company. There's not in the case of a digital asset that people refer to as a coin or token.
As far as shares, no. It's completely different. Shares are equity securities, that entitle people to dividends or they want the shares to go up in price. Regardless, it sets up a never-ending demand for enshittification and rent extraction that you see across Big Tech. Utility tokens are fundamentally different and don't have those perverse incentives, and remove the shareholder class. It's like comparing shares in Disney Corp, to Disney Dollars.
I am saying that Web3 should be used by existing celebrities to monetize their existing fame and social capital, sell unsold seats, etc.
I am saying that existing organizations, communities, including entire cities, can benefit from having a decentralized system powered by smart contracts, rather than a random FinTech that posts a surety bond, powering their commerce at scale.
Yes, shares don't necessarily entitle people to dividends, but the point is that the shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, forever. And this is a problem, that doesn't exist when you have utility tokens and cut out the parasitic shareholder class completely.
Back in 2017, I designed a system to avoid global consensus:
https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf
If you want to see a visual presentation that explains why we need to go beyond blockchains, then check this out:
If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain a large fraction of the value of collateral.
This is prevented by central banks. If you try to execute this corner, you will drive up prices, so they will start printing money.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum, both remain memes. Fiat currencies have non-mem value due to the debt.
The government does constantly devalue the currency, though. It does it at an imperceptible pace to not scare the chickens and make business viable. But that's the most they can collect from this system. Anything more and they blow the whole monetary system away.
The money-printing used to break a corner can in principle be small and you can even have an inflation target of zero and still print money to break such corners.
What I want to emphasize with this though, is the source of a currency's value. The collateral of the debt of the loans denominated in it and the social and economic consequences to individuals of defaulting on loans in it. That is the end-source of demand for a currency, and that guaranteed demand is so great that it makes attempting to corner the market in the currency make sense.
If you cornered the market in bitcoin, there's no one who would have to buy even one. That shows how little bitcoin is worth, i.e. zero.
If this makes sense to you, then it'll make sense why Bitcoin is worth something. There is a circular demand to it even without debt. I'll not argue to the legitimacy of that demands (scams, phishing, laundering, etc...) but it is demand and it creates a baseline value (beyond the boom/busts it cycles through).
Because there are denominated loans in dollars people who have those loans have to get dollars to avoid losing their houses etc., and therefore dollars have value.
Because there's very little in loans denominated in Bitcoin, bitcoin has no value.
If he goes on to promote some unknown shitcoin, said coin could easily pump 1000%, and fall harder.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
Any other administration this would have been a huge scandal but when we're in an avalanche of corruption I guess it can be missed.
Liquidity is necessary, and a good marker, but not sufficient.
How so? Liquidity is a measurement of how easy it is to trade, and if it's easy to trade there are many people/entities that believe it's "legitimate" currency, or they wouldn't trade for it
This is where I personally think bitcoin fails.
I completely agree. I don't think this is different from saying the store of value needs to stay liquid tho. Bitcoin is currently very illiquid compared to many things, but there's no reason to think it's liquidity will decrease, and based on trends and first principles of what makes something a good 'money', significant reason to believe liquidity will continue to increase
What I do take issue with is this keeps happening because there's a lot of money to be made off transaction fees so nobody looks too hard into how fraudulent any of these memecoins are before allowing them on the trading platforms.
Admittedly, I don't know how the trading system works so maybe the platforms taking a cut of the profits from the blatantly fraudulent activity are victims too? Crying all the way to the bank I suppose...
You're not wrong that like 99.9% of BTC value is from speculation, but it does have its valid use cases.
It is work to 'get' it tho. All the info is available; I can't make it easier to understand than many others out there already have.
Gold Standard, Government Protection, Debt, Government credit instruments.
But everything I read about currency tells me that its largely always just agreed upon make believe. The case with the Real absolutely confirmed that for me.
The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.
Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
And, conversely, if you try to pay with cash to some shady people in a parking lot, there's not much good you're going to get out of courts if they defraud you.
Just like currency. All of those were imaginary since they were invented. People have create physical representations for currency in particular, but that doesn't change the fact that it's only a group of people agreeing on something that only exist on their heads.
Equally imaginary things are "corporations", "governments", "military"... If you push hard enough, even "person" fits that, but this one is deeply entrenched in people's minds.
From a personal perspective, that absolutely has value. From a public perspective, is the existence of that a good thing? Whole different kettle of fish (and then you're back on the whole "is end to end encryption bad" argument).